ABSTRACT

As promised, this book complicates the idea of ‘woman’ and her needs in the context of the HIV pandemic. Based in US epidemiology and its social and cultural concepts of gender and sexuality, the categories for counting those affected in the epidemic are deeply culture-bound. Policy and research, too, have not stretched very far from their original, disciplinary conceptions of ‘women’, if women indeed figured in their work at all. The US media recycled their own constructions of women, altering and complementing those already instrinsic to the science they reported and those already present in the minds of the public they addressed.